How to Change Language for Individual Apps on Mac
Most Mac users assume the system language is all-or-nothing: change it, and everything from Finder to your third-party apps follows along. That's not quite right. macOS has a dedicated setting for how to change language for individual apps on Mac, letting you override one app's display language while leaving the rest of the system exactly as it was (Apple Support).
Apple's own documentation, last updated a year ago, gives a clean example: run macOS in Simplified Chinese as the system language, but keep one specific app in English. Nothing else changes (Apple Support). It's a small feature with a genuinely practical use case, whether you're running English-first work software on a machine set to a different regional language, dealing with an app whose translation is worse than its original, or setting up a family or learning app in a second language.
There's a catch worth knowing before you touch any settings: this only works if the app itself has the language you want built in. macOS can offer only what the app was built to display; it can't invent a translation the developer never shipped. This guide walks through setting the override, sorting out an app that refuses to switch, what the setting does and doesn't touch, and an optional fix for the narrower problem of number and date formatting.
Before you start
The app you want to change has to already be installed. The Applications list in Language & Region only lets you pick from apps macOS can find on the Mac, so there's nothing to configure for software you haven't downloaded yet.
Language availability also varies app by app. One app might ship with fifteen languages baked in; another might only have two. The setting can't add a language an app doesn't already support, which is the root cause of most of the "it didn't work" problems covered further down.
How to change language for individual apps on Mac
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Open System Settings > General > Language & Region, then click into Applications. This is a dedicated list built specifically for per-app overrides, kept separate from the main Language & Region setting that governs the rest of your Mac (Apple Support).
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Click the add button (+), then choose an app and a language from the two pop-up menus that appear, and click Add. That's the entire mechanism: no Terminal commands, no restart required at this stage (Apple Support).
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Quit and reopen the app if it was already running when you made the change. Apple's guidance says you may need to quit and reopen an open app to see the new language take hold, and in some cases restarting the Mac is what gets every app to reflect it (Apple Support).
Once that's done, macOS decides which language actually shows up according to a fixed order: the app's own explicit localization first, then the Mac's primary system language, then English as a last resort (Apple Support; The Eclectic Light Company). If the app doesn't include the language you picked, macOS doesn't throw an error. It quietly steps down through that list instead, which can look identical to the setting simply not working.
Changing your mind later is just as simple. Select the app in the Applications list and choose a different language from the pop-up menu to swap it, or select the app and remove it to send it back to the system default (Apple Support).
Troubleshooting: When the setting appears to do nothing
Quit the app fully, using Cmd+Q rather than closing its window, and relaunch it. Apple's documentation specifically calls out this step for apps that were open when you made the change (Apple Support).
If that doesn't fix it, check whether the app actually ships the language you selected. Most "broken" cases trace back to the fallback order described above, not a genuine bug: the app simply never had that localization to offer.
Try a different language the app is known to support, or remove the override and re-add it. That rules out a one-time glitch as opposed to a real gap in the app's translations.
Two separate problems tend to get mixed up here, and it's worth telling them apart:
- Untranslated menus, buttons, or dialog text: this points to a localization gap in the app itself, not a setting you can fix from System Settings.
- Dates, numbers, or currency in an unexpected format despite the correct interface language: this is a separate locale issue, covered in the advanced section below.
There's a documented example of the first kind. A bug report filed against Fyne, an open-source app framework, found that macOS correctly listed language options for an app built with it, but selecting a language did nothing because the framework hadn't yet added support for the mechanism (Fyne GitHub issue #5277). A contributor later noted the problem appeared resolved in the framework's development branch after a follow-up fix went in (Fyne GitHub issue #5277). It's a narrow, framework-specific gap rather than evidence the macOS feature itself is flaky, and a good reminder that the setting depends on the app's cooperation as much as the operating system's.
What this setting changes, and what it doesn't
The Applications override changes an app's interface, its menus, buttons, and dialog text, and nothing beyond that app (Apple Support). It's scoped tightly on purpose.
It doesn't touch your Mac's overall system language. Everything outside the app you configured, Finder, System Settings, other apps, keeps using your primary Language & Region setting exactly as before (Apple Support).
It also doesn't automatically fix regional formatting, and this is where people run into confusion after they've technically succeeded. Language and locale sound like the same thing but aren't. A locale is language plus region, and English (UK) and English (Canada) count as different locales despite sharing a language (Apple Developer). That pairing, not the display language alone, is what governs number formats, date formats, and currency symbols.
Here's a concrete version of that gap: a Mac set to English with Switzerland as its region will still format a number as 1'000,50 inside an app, even though every menu and button in that app is displaying in English. Language and regional formatting run as two separate systems, so fixing one doesn't automatically fix the other (iustin/k1024.org).
Fixing an app's number and date formatting
This section only matters if the problem is formatting, not translation. If the app's interface language is already right and your only complaint is that a spreadsheet or invoice tool is showing numbers or dates in the wrong style, the steps above already solved your problem.
For that narrower issue, a 2023 technical post describes a Terminal-based workaround: writing a locale value directly to a single app's preferences, independent of the system region and the Language & Region override above.
defaults write -app FooBar AppleLocale en_US
Replace FooBar with the app's name. The author of that post reports this set the en_US locale for one specific app on their Mac, which changed how that app parsed and displayed numbers and dates (iustin/k1024.org). It's worth treating that as one person's documented result rather than a guarantee for every app, since the source itself is a single writeup rather than Apple documentation.
The same post draws a comparison to Linux, where running an app with the right environment variables used to produce a similar effect on Mac before Apple deprecated that approach (iustin/k1024.org).
To reverse it, remove the key:
defaults delete -app FooBar AppleLocale
The expected result is that the app goes back to inheriting whatever locale the system is set to, though it's worth checking the app after running this rather than assuming it took effect.
A few caveats matter here. This is an undocumented workaround pulled from a single technical writeup, not a supported Apple feature. The same author notes that Apple sometimes changes behavior without documenting it, which means there's no assurance this command works the same way after every macOS update (iustin/k1024.org). Test it on an app you're not depending on for anything critical before trusting it for daily use.
Next steps
Pick one app you use daily that's stuck in the wrong language, add it to the Applications list, and relaunch it. If the interface switches over, the override is doing its job.
If it doesn't, work through the fallback logic above before assuming the feature is broken. And if the menus look right but numbers or dates still seem off, that's a locale problem rather than a language one, worth solving separately with the Terminal workaround rather than by fiddling with Language & Region again.
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